That future took a very long time to arrive, but finally it seems to be here – complete with a whole new set of buzzwords and web design techniques. Sadly, it turns out that my WML skills are not required.

ITV News and BBC News are two UK news organisations that are definitely pushing a mobile future, and both have recently relaunched the services they aim at users of phones.

The ITV News redesign is a radical approach to delivering digital news, which leaves behind a lot of the baggage that usually comes with being a traditional news publisher. Indeed in a blogpost about the project, William Owen of Made By Many, the agency who worked on the design, declared:

"It's possible that we wouldn't have been able to achieve such a simple and radical outcome if working with a news organisation with an underlying culture of print: we would most likely have trod on too many toes, threatened the privilege of old skills, been seen to be tearing down a valuable legacy."

The ITV News site turns every story into a kind of live blog stream, pulling in updates from other news sources as well as ITV's own reporters and video. Each story or story theme has a single URL where the latest updates are posted, recalling the "Living stories" experiment that Google did with the Washington Post and the New York Times in 2009.

One of the key changes is that the design is "responsive" – a newish buzzword for sites that change according to the device you are viewing them on. This might mean the order of content displayed to the user changes, or that the actual content itself is different.

The BBC are also going down this route, with m.bbc.co.uk/news varying what you see depending on the size of screen you have and the type of internet access you are using. The BBC's Chris Russell blogged about the changes.

It is an evolving space for media organisations. I've been using the ITV News site on my phone for a few weeks to try out the new approach, and I've found it a little brittle. The stark, minimal front page on a small screen is not much more than a logo and a few headlines, and I think the impact of news is lessened, especially with human interest stories, without images, even if they are only being delivered at thumbnail size.

There is a wider debate in the web design community about this approach. Grandfather of usability Jakob Nielsen recently suggested that businesses should still maintain a separate mobile website – as the Guardian does with m.guardian.co.uk being a different experience from the desktop version.

There is something more important than devices and screen size at play when making these kinds of decisions about the type of content to serve users, as Alex Morris argued in this Tumblr post.

Detecting the screen size of my laptop and deciding I want HD video embedded at the top of an article is no good for me if I'm trying to coax a workable connection out of what passes for the Wi-Fi service on some of our trains in the UK. Similarly, there isn't much point in giving me a sparse text-only experience on my phone if I'm actually sitting on my sofa connected to my perfectly good home network.

Getting this next step of the evolution from the desktop web to the ubiquitous web is a real design challenge for media organisations and beyond. There is not going to be a one-size-fits-all answer.

Martin Belam runs the user experience team at the Guardian, working across their award-winning website, mobile platforms and Facebook app. He blogs about user experience, journalism and digital media at currybet.net – follow him on Twitter @currybet